Gardening tips: plant a star jasmine

Then visit Kew’s orchid festival and protect houseplants from spider mite

Plant this For an evergreen climber with a scent that knocks your socks off come summer, look no further than star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides). It needs full sun and a sheltered spot.

Visit this Kew’s 25th annual orchid festival opens on 8 February, showcasing the wildlife and culture of Indonesia. Expect stunning displays of orchids, including an erupting volcano made of the flowers as a centrepiece. Until 8 March, details at kew.org.

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For peat’s sake: how to protect bogs | Alys Fowler

We can all help to preserve these precious landscapes

In a shallow pool amid a mossy landscape is a trap, a tiny triggered vacuum that sucks in unexpected prey at great speed, absorbs what it needs, then ejects the empty husk of its victim. If you’ve sunk and splashed your way through a peat bog in summer, you may have caught a glimpse of the plant’s more alluring feature, the showy yellow flowers that wave above the water.

Bladderworts are free-floating aquatic plants that sink back in winter to tight buds, washed along in the currents of wilder weather. They are not alone in their bizarre eating habits. There are sundews whose hundreds of pin-shaped tentacles wrap their sticky digestive juices around their prey, and butterworts, which possess the strongest glue in nature to trap hapless insects wandering over them, among the heathers and layers of sphagnum moss that make up peatland.

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Cutting it fine: why winter stems should be left until the last minute

Chicago’s magnificent Lurie Garden is a great advert for delaying your big chop

An admission: for a gardener professing to love the wilder, naturalistic look, I have difficulty restraining my inner neat-freak. When it comes to the annual cut-back of spent herbaceous stems – a task carried out between autumn and spring, depending on your preference – I have a propensity to rush for the secateurs. The idea of leaving so much garden maintenance to the last moment is often too unsettling. But over the years I have learned to be patient. With garden designers increasingly championing “four-season” planting schemes, an appreciation of winter seedheads – which are attractive, and an important resource for wildlife – has curbed my pre-Christmas tidy-ups: now I wait until February-March, when signs of new growth appear at the base of perennials, before chopping away dead stems.

A garden very much embracing this delayed cut-back is the Lurie in downtown Chicago, a three-acre plot at the south of the city’s Millennium Park and a masterpiece of year-round herbaceous planting. Its naturalistic scheme – which includes over 120 native prairie species – reconnects the city with the surrounding Midwestern grasslands and their dramatic seasonal flux. As in the wild, flower and grass stems are left standing right through to spring, before they are mown to ground level.

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Gardening tips: plant a star jasmine

Then visit Kew’s orchid festival and protect houseplants from spider mite

Plant this For an evergreen climber with a scent that knocks your socks off come summer, look no further than star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides). It needs full sun and a sheltered spot.

Visit this Kew’s 25th annual orchid festival opens on 8 February, showcasing the wildlife and culture of Indonesia. Expect stunning displays of orchids, including an erupting volcano made of the flowers as a centrepiece. Until 8 March, details at kew.org.

Continue reading...

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For peat’s sake: how to protect bogs | Alys Fowler

We can all help to preserve these precious landscapes

In a shallow pool amid a mossy landscape is a trap, a tiny triggered vacuum that sucks in unexpected prey at great speed, absorbs what it needs, then ejects the empty husk of its victim. If you’ve sunk and splashed your way through a peat bog in summer, you may have caught a glimpse of the plant’s more alluring feature, the showy yellow flowers that wave above the water.

Bladderworts are free-floating aquatic plants that sink back in winter to tight buds, washed along in the currents of wilder weather. They are not alone in their bizarre eating habits. There are sundews whose hundreds of pin-shaped tentacles wrap their sticky digestive juices around their prey, and butterworts, which possess the strongest glue in nature to trap hapless insects wandering over them, among the heathers and layers of sphagnum moss that make up peatland.

Continue reading...

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via IFTTT

Cutting it fine: why winter stems should be left until the last minute

Chicago’s magnificent Lurie Garden is a great advert for delaying your big chop

An admission: for a gardener professing to love the wilder, naturalistic look, I have difficulty restraining my inner neat-freak. When it comes to the annual cut-back of spent herbaceous stems – a task carried out between autumn and spring, depending on your preference – I have a propensity to rush for the secateurs. The idea of leaving so much garden maintenance to the last moment is often too unsettling. But over the years I have learned to be patient. With garden designers increasingly championing “four-season” planting schemes, an appreciation of winter seedheads – which are attractive, and an important resource for wildlife – has curbed my pre-Christmas tidy-ups: now I wait until February-March, when signs of new growth appear at the base of perennials, before chopping away dead stems.

A garden very much embracing this delayed cut-back is the Lurie in downtown Chicago, a three-acre plot at the south of the city’s Millennium Park and a masterpiece of year-round herbaceous planting. Its naturalistic scheme – which includes over 120 native prairie species – reconnects the city with the surrounding Midwestern grasslands and their dramatic seasonal flux. As in the wild, flower and grass stems are left standing right through to spring, before they are mown to ground level.

Continue reading...

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Britain's buy-to-let boom is over - we should rejoice | Patrick Collinson

The number of landlords with multiple properties is falling as cuts to tax relief bite

The two decades of fat, lazy profits made on the backs of squeezing as much rental cash as possible out of young adults while smugly sitting on vast unearned house price gains look to be over. This April the final phase of the tax changes on buy-to-let income comes into force, and the good news is that landlords are giving up on the game.

HMRC data obtained by accountants Moore this week show that the number of buy-to-let landlords with multiple properties fell in 2017-18 to 157,000 from 159,000 the year before. The fall may be slight, but it’s important, as it marks the first decline since the financial crisis.

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